“Apple says it needs a little longer to finish up work on iTunes 11,” Josh Lowensohn reports for CNET. “The software, which adds a handful of new features and a facelift, was previewed at an event last month, and was originally due by the end of October.”

MacDailyNews Take: iTunes 11 is more than a mere “facelift.” It is a completely redesigned player and a newly remodeled iTunes Store.

“Apple now says the software will be out before the end of next month,” Lowensohn reports. “‘The new iTunes is taking longer than expected and we wanted to take a little extra time to get it right,’ Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told CNET. ‘We look forward to releasing this new version of iTunes with its dramatically simpler and cleaner interface, and seamless integration with iCloud before the end of November.'”

Lowensohn reports, “As of last month, Apple said it had more than 435 million iTunes accounts set up with 1-Click purchasing, meaning accounts with credit cards or other payment options attached. The storefront itself has a catalog of 26 million songs available for purchase, of which there have been 20 billion purchased by consumers during the past nine years. Apple’s last major iteration of iTunes, version 10, was released in September 2010.”

“This is the nature of software” excuse is crap. All technological development involves hard work, iterative effort, and plenty of setbacks. Yes, execution of the plan is critical, but 9 times out of 10 a missed schedule can be directly attributed to the arrogance or willful ignorance of the guy creating an unrealistic schedule.

Mike, this Mike (me) has written and shipped lots of software for over thirty years. I gather you haven’t. Even with good planning and a total lack of arrogance, software sometimes takes longer than you hope. Missing a ship date by a month for something this complicated isn’t really much of a sin.

I think you misunderstand my post. All tech development, software or otherwise, involves setbacks. Never claimed it was a sin for tech development to not hit internal goals.

The issue here is that somebody just couldn’t wait to tell the whole world about the new software, choosing to blab his imaginary marketing schedule to the world instead of keeping his trap shut and listening to the engineers. Typical management hubris.

Take as long as is necessary to get it right! And by the way, why don’t you really stick it to amazon and others AND make it easier for the rest of us by adding hardware and other items for purchase with “one click”? With all the bragging of the number of subscribers with credit card info on line the store shelves are not really as full as some would like.

Tim “make the trains run on time” Cook needs to realize that SOME practices from the Jobs era were correct and don’t need to be changed. Often, Jobs wouldn’t announce new products/software in advance, only when they were ready to ship. When Jobs himself violated that rule, Apple often embarrassed themselves by not meeting their own deadline. If your goal is top-notch software, that DOESN’T happen on a schedule. Certainly fine to have internal timelines as GOALS, but public timelines often result in either inferior software or missed benchmarks.